“Jesus,” Sloan said, looking at Lucas, impressed.
“But he can be charming,” Sandy said. “And you can shame him out of stuff. Like a little boy. Unless he’s drunk, then he’s unstoppable.”
“You keep talking about drinking. Is he drunk a lot?”
“Oh, yeah,” Sandy nodded. “He’s an alcoholic, no question. So are most of his friends. But Dick’s not one of those guys who’s drunk all the time—he’ll go dry for a while, but then he’ll go off on a toot and be crazy for two weeks.”
“Somebody cut this prison officer’s throat while he was cuffed up and laying on the floor. You think LaChaise could do that?” Lucas asked.
“He could if he was in one of his bad-boy moods,” Sandy said. “No question. I don’t know if I’m getting this across—but when I say like a mean little boy, I mean just like that. He has tantrums, like fits. He scares everybody when he has one, because he’s nuts, and because he’s so strong. That’s what’s going on now: he’s having one of his tantrums.”
“But a kid’s tantrum only lasts a few minutes . . .”
“Well, Dick’s can go on for a while. A week, or a couple of weeks.”
“Is that how he came to get involved in this murder over in Michigan? A tantrum?”
“Oh, no, he wasn’t involved in that,” she said. “The cops framed him.”
Lucas and Sloan both glanced away from her at the same moment, and she smiled, just a bit. “So you don’t believe me—but they did,” she said. “I testified at the trial. There was this guy named Frank Wyatt, who killed another guy named Larry Waters. The prosecution said that Waters stole some dope from Wyatt, and that Dick owned part of the dope—which he may have, I don’t know. Anyway, the night that the dope was stolen, the prosecution said Dick and Wyatt got together at a tavern in Green Bay and talked about killing Waters.”
“That was the conspiracy,” Lucas said.
“Yes.” Sandy nodded. “They had this informant. They let him off some dope charges for his testimony. He testified that he was at the tavern when Wyatt and Dick talked. Wyatt shot Waters the next day.”
“And you say LaChaise wasn’t at the tavern?” Sloan asked.
“I know he wasn’t,” Sandy said. “ ’Cause he was at my place. I had a filly who broke a leg, shattered it. There was nothing we could do about it, the break couldn’t be fixed, we had to put her down. I hate to do that; just hate it. Dick and Candy were in town, and I mentioned it to them. Dick said he’d take care of it, and he did. That was the night he was supposed to be in Green Bay. I had it written in ink on my income-tax calendar. In fact, Dick and Candy were there that whole week . . . But the jury didn’t believe me. The prosecution said, ‘She’s his sister-in-law, she’s just lying for him.’ ”
“Well.” Lucas looked at Sloan again, who shrugged, and Lucas said, “We know it happens. You get some asshole—excuse me—who goes around wrecking people’s lives, and you get a shot at him, and some cops’ll take it.”
“Sort of like you took with Candy and Georgie?” Sandy asked.
“We didn’t cheat with Candy and Georgie,” Lucas said, shaking his head. “They went to the credit union to rob it—nobody made them do it, or suggested that they do it. They did it on their own hook: we were just watching them.”
She looked steadily at him, then nodded. “All right,” she said. “If I was a cop, I’d have done the same thing.”
THEY TALKED FOR a few more minutes, but nothing developed that would help. Lucas and Sloan said good-bye to the sheriff and headed for the car.
“What do you think about Sandy Darling?” Lucas asked as they skated down the sidewalk.
Sloan shook his head. “I don’t know. She’s a tough one, and she’s no dummy. But she was scared.”
“The cops scared her,” Lucas said. “They were pushing her pretty hard.”
“Not scared that way,” Sloan said. Lucas tossed him the car keys and Sloan popped the driver’s-side door. “She was scared like . . .”
They got in, and Sloan fired the car up, and after another moment, continued: “. . . she was scared like she was afraid she’d make a mistake. Like she was making up a story, and was afraid we’d break it down. If she isn’t involved, she doesn’t need a story. But I felt like she was working on one.”
Lucas, staring out the window as they rolled through the small town, said, “Huh.” And then, “You know, I kind of like her.”
“I noticed,” Sloan said. “That always makes them harder to arrest.”
Lucas grinned, and Sloan let the car unwind down the snaky road toward the I-94.
“We better take a little care,” Lucas said finally. “We’ll get the word out, that we’re looking for anybody asking about cops. And get some paper going on the guy, and his connections. Roust any assholes who might know him.”
“I’ve never had any comebacks,” Sloan said. “A few threats, nothing real.”
“I’ve had a couple minor ones,” Lucas said, nodding.
“That’s what you get for sneaking around in the weeds all those years,” Sloan said. Then: “Bet I beat your time going back.”
“Let me get my seat belt on,” Lucas said.
LACHAISE STRETCHED OUT on a bed, a soft mattress for the first time in four years, and breathed the freedom. Or looseness. Later, he made some coffee, some peanut-butter-and-Ritz-cracker sandwiches, listened to the radio. He heard five or six reports on his escape and the killing of Sand, excited country reporters with a real story. One said that police believed he might be on foot, and they were doing a house-by-house check in the town of Colfax.
That made him smile: they still didn’t know how he’d gotten out.
He could hear the wind blowing outside the trailer, and after a while, he put on a coat and went outside and walked around. Took a leak in the freezing outhouse, then walked down to the edge of the woods and looked down a gully. Deer tracks, but nothing in sight. He could feel the cold, and he walked back to the trailer. The sun was nearly gone, a dim aspirin-sized pill trying to break through a screen of bare aspen.
He listened to the radio some more: the search in Colfax was done. The Dunn County sheriff said blah-blah-blah nothing.
Still, nightfall was a relief. With night came the sense that the search would slow down, that cops would be going home. He found a stack of army blankets and draped them across the windows to black them out. After turning on the lights, he walked once around the outside of the trailer, to make sure he didn’t have any light leaks, came back inside, adjusted one of the blankets, and climbed back to the bed. The silence of the woods had been forgotten, submerged in his years in a cell, and for a while he couldn’t sleep.
He did sleep, but when he heard the tires crunching on the snow, he was awake in an instant. He sat up and took the Bulldog off the floor. A moment later, he heard footsteps, and then the door rattled.
“Who is that?” he asked.
A woman’s voice came back: “Sandy.”
HER FACE WAS tight, angry. “You jerk,” she said. He was looking down at her, the gun pointed at her chest. Coldly furious, she ignored it. “I want you out of here. Now.”
“Come in and shut the door, you’re letting the cold in,” he said. He backed away from her, but continued to look out over her head. “You didn’t bring the cops?”
“No. I didn’t bring the cops. But I want you out of here, Dick . . .”
“Tomorrow,” he said. “We’re heading for Mexico.”
“At the funeral home, they said you were gunning for these cops that killed Candy and Georgie.”
“Yeah, well . . .” He shrugged.
“Why’d you kill the prison guard?” she asked.
His eyes shifted, and she felt him gathering a reason, an excuse: “He was the meanest sonofabitch on the floor. If you knew what he’d done . . .”
“But now they’re looking for you for murder.”
He shrugged: “That’s what I was in for.”
“But you
didn’t have anything to do with that,” she said.
“Didn’t make no difference to them,” he said.
“My God, Dick, there is a difference . . .”
“You didn’t know this guy,” LaChaise said. “If you’d known what Sand put my friends through back in the joint . . .” He shook his head. “You couldn’t blame us. No man oughta go through that.”
He was talking about rape, she knew. She didn’t buy it, but she wouldn’t press him, either. She wanted to believe and if she pressed him, she was afraid she’d find out he was lying.
“Whatever,” she said. “But now you’ve got to move. Martin was bragging about how good his truck is: If you leave tomorrow, you can be in Arizona the day after, driving straight through. You can be in Mexico the day after that, down on the Pacific Ocean.”
“Yeah, we’re figuring that out,” LaChaise said, but again, his eyes shifted fractionally. “What happened at the funeral home?”
“The police kept us there for a couple of hours—and two detectives from Minneapolis talked to us—and then they took us down to Menomonie, to the courthouse. We had to sign statements, and then they let us go. A couple of deputies came around again, about dinnertime, and checked the house.”
“They have a warrant?”
“No, but I let them in, I thought it was best,” she said. “They looked around and left.”
“What about Elmore?”
“Elmore was at work,” Sandy said. “They already talked to him.”
“Would Elmore turn us in?” LaChaise said.
“No. He’s as scared as I am,” Sandy said, and the anger suddenly leaped to the surface: “Why’d you do it, Dick? We’ve never done anything to you, and now you’re dragging us down with you.”
“We needed a place to ditch,” LaChaise said defensively. “We didn’t know what the situation would be. If the cops were right on our ass, we needed some place we could get out of sight in a hurry. I thought of this place.”
“Well, I want you out,” Sandy said. She poked a finger at him. “If you’re not out, I’ll have to take the chance and go to the police myself. When you get out, I’ll come out here and wipe everything you’ve touched . . . and I hope to hell if you get caught, you’ll have the decency to keep your mouth shut about this place.”
“I won’t get caught,” LaChaise said. “I’m not going back inside. If I get killed, that’s the way it is: but I’m not going back.”
“But if you do get caught . . . you know, shot and you wake up in a hospital . . .”
“No way I’d tell them about this,” LaChaise said, shaking his head. “No way.”
“All right.” She glanced at her watch. “I better get going, in case those deputies check back. I’ll tell you something, though: one of the Minneapolis cops was this Davenport guy. The guy who’s in charge of the group that killed Candy and Georgie.”
“I know who he is,” LaChaise said. “So?”
“He’s awful hard,” she said.
“I’m awful hard, too,” LaChaise said.
She nodded: “I’m just telling you,” she said.
When Sandy left, she walked head-down to her car, and sat inside for a moment before she started it. Now she was guilty of something, she thought. As a hardworking, taxpaying Republican rancher, she should be in favor of sending herself to prison for what she’d just done. But she wasn’t. She’d do anything to stay out—the idea of a prison cell made her knees weak. If Dick had landed anywhere else, she’d have turned him in. But the trailer hide-out would be impossible to explain, and she’d had the experience, in LaChaise’s earlier trial, of seeing what vindictive cops could do.
Damn. She thought about the weapons in the hall closet back home, a .22, a deer rifle, a shotgun. She’d never considered anything like this before, but she could go home, get Elmore’s deer rifle, come back out here . . .
Get Dick outside.
Boom.
She could dump his body in a cornfield somewhere, and nobody would know anything until spring. And if the coyotes got to him, probably not even then. She sighed. She couldn’t do anything like that. She’d never wanted to hurt anyone in her life. But she wasn’t going under. She’d swim for it.
WEATHER AND LUCAS ate handmade ravioli from an Italian market while Lucas told her about the trip to Colfax. Weather said, “Tell me that last part again. About the eye-for-an-eye.”
Lucas shrugged. “We have to take a little care. The guy won’t be running around for long, there’re too many people looking for him. But everybody involved in the shooting . . . I’ve told them to keep an eye out.”
“You think he’d come here, looking for you?” she asked.
“I don’t think so,” Lucas said. Then he said, “I don’t know. Maybe. He’s nuts. We’ve got to take a little care, that’s all.”
“That’s why you’ve got the gun under your chair. A little care.”
Lucas stopped with a forkful of pasta halfway to his mouth. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But it’s no big deal—and it’s just for a little while.”
5
EARLY MORNING AT the Black Watch.
Andy Stadic pushed through the front door, took his gloves off and unbuttoned his overcoat as he walked around the bar and through the double swinging doors into the kitchen. Opening the coat freed up his weapon: not that he’d need it, but he did it by habit.
Stadic was short, bullet-headed, with close-cropped hair and suspicious, slightly bulging eyes. In the kitchen, he nodded to the cook, who was chopping onions into twenty pounds of raw burger, ignored the Chicano dishwasher, turned the corner past the pan rack and pushed through another set of doors.
The back room was cool, lit with overhead fluorescent, furnished with cartons of empty beer bottles, boxes of paper towels and toilet paper, cans of ketchup, sacks of potatoes—the whole room smelled of wet paper and potatoes and onions and a bit of cigar smoke.
Daymon Harp sat in one of two red plastic chairs at a rickety round table, chewing gum, his feet stretched out in front of him, crossed at the ankles. He wore a bomber jacket, faded Levi’s and purple cowboy boots with sterling-silver toes.
“What’d you want?” Stadic asked, standing, hands in his pockets.
“We got a problem.” Harp uncrossed his legs, put a foot on the second chair, and pushed it across the concrete floor at Stadic.
“I don’t want to hear about problems,” Stadic said.
“Can’t be helped,” Harp said.
“Man, I hate even seeing you,” Stadic said. “If the shooflies walked in right now, I’d be all done. I’d be on the one-stop train to Stillwater.”
“I couldn’t help it. Sit down, goddamnit.”
Stadic turned the chair and straddled it, his arms crossed on the back. “What?”
“Two guys showed up at my crib last night,” Harp said. “Put some guns on me. They were looking for your name.”
“My name?”
“Yeah. They knew I was working with a cop, but they didn’t know your name.”
“Jesus Christ, Harp . . .”
“They said they’d cut one finger off Jas every ten seconds until I came out with it, and had something to prove it by. They were gonna cut off two fingers just to show that they was tellin’ the truth. And after they got all ten fingers, they said, they were gonna cut out her eyes and then cut her throat and then they were gonna start on me.”
“You told them?” Stadic’s voice rose in disbelief.
“Goddamn right I told them,” Harp said. “They cut her pointer finger off right there, on a bread board. She was all tied up and gagged and flopping around, and they were like they was killed chickens or something . . . couple of goddamn mean crackers. I been in the joint with these motherfuckers before. They got little tears tattooed under their eyes, one for each man they killed, and when you start tattooing them on, you better be able to prove it to the rest of the crazies. This crackhead kid’s got three of them and the fucker with the knife got two.”
r /> “You coulda said anything,” Stadic said.
Harp shook his head. “They wanted proof. I had a little proof.”
Now Stadic was very quiet. “What proof?”
“I had some pictures taken.”
“You motherfucker . . .” Stadic stood up, kicked the chair aside, his hand moving toward his pistol. Harp held his hands up.
“It was from way back when, when I didn’t know you. And I had Jas’s motherfuckin’ finger laying there like a dead shrimp, all curled up. What the hell was I supposed to do?”
“You coulda tried lying,” Stadic shouted. His fingers twitched at the gun butt.
“You wasn’t there,” Harp said. “You don’t know.”
Stadic took a breath, as though he’d just topped a hill, turned in place, then said, “So what’d they want with my name?”
“They need some information from you.”
“Tell me.” He was nibbling nervously at a thumbnail, ripped off a piece of nail, spit it out, tasted blood. The nail was bleeding, and he sucked at it, the blood salty in his mouth.
“They want personnel files,” Harp said. “From the police department.”
LACHAISE HAD SPENT whole days thinking about it, daydreaming it, when he was locked up: the requirements of the coming wars. Us against Them. They would need a base. In the countryside, somewhere. There’d be a series of log cabins linked with storm sewer pipe, six feet underground and more sewer pipe set into the hills as bunkers. Honda generators for each cabin, with internal wells and septic fields.
Weapons: sniper rifles to keep the attackers off, heavy-duty assault rifles for up close. Hidden land mines with remote triggers. Armor-piercing rockets. He’d close his eyes and see the assaults happening, the attackers falling back as they met the sweeping fire from the web . . .
The attackers were a little less certain; some combination of ATF agents and blacks from the Chicago ghettos, Indians, Mexicans. Though that didn’t seem to make a lot of sense, sometimes; so sometimes, they were all ATF agents, dressed in black uniforms and masks . . .